


The Curious Lives Of Melody Pond

by mountain_born



Series: The Marvelous Tale of an Agent, an Archer, and an Assassin [10]
Category: Doctor Who (2005), Marvel (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Doctor Who/Avengers Crossover Fusion, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-22
Updated: 2013-07-22
Packaged: 2017-12-21 00:28:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,941
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/893673
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mountain_born/pseuds/mountain_born
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For over three years, Phil Coulson has been occupied by a certain question:  Who exactly <i>is</i> River Song?  During an impromptu period of R&R in Scotland his search leads him to a new question.  Who is Melody Pond?</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Curious Lives Of Melody Pond

**Author's Note:**

> All I can say is, poor Phil. I'll owe him a very large cup of spiked coffee once he finally gets his answers.
> 
> I should note that there's an OFC in this story who has fairly significant "screen time". Waaay back in the beginning of this venture, in the series of vignettes entitled _Don't Travel Alone_ , I gave Coulson a "standing booty call in Arlington" in the form of an old college girlfriend with whom he's kept in touch. This was mostly because a) it amused me and b) it added another fun layer to Coulson's personality. This character has started to grow and take on a life of her own (as characters seem to have a habit of doing).
> 
> Once again, I lay flowers at the beta-ing shrine of **like-a-raven** for her skills, for keeping me on track and motivated, and for turning Valerie into a three-dimensional character.

_December 2008_  
 _Oban, Scotland_

Phil Coulson was a big believer in gut instinct.

It was something that his job had taught him to trust. That prickling on the back of your neck--that odd, nagging little nudge that told you to turn left when you would have gone right--could save your life. It could steer you clear of danger. It could draw your attention to something important that was sitting right in front of you.

Coulson knew in his gut that Oban was important. There was a reason why River had brought them here. Fury had told River to take him and Clint somewhere to rest and recover after the disastrous training conference on the SHIELD base in Sussex, but the exact location had been left entirely to her discretion. Coulson hadn’t been surprised that she’d taken them to Scotland. He wouldn’t have given it a second thought if she’d taken them someplace like Edinburgh or Glasgow, but she hadn’t. She had brought them to this little port town on the western coast that he had never even heard of before.

Coulson couldn’t help but feel that he was very close to something here.

Oban couldn’t possibly be River’s home town. River guarded her past far too carefully for that. She wouldn’t bring Clint and Coulson to a place where people might recognize her, and no one here did. At the same time, River fit in here. She knew her way around. She looked at ease. She seemed to enjoy chatting with the shopkeepers, her accent getting so thick that it had lapsed into full-fledged Gaelic on more than one occasion.

It was a puzzle, like almost everything else about River. After years of hiding her roots, she wouldn’t just turn right around and lay them out in plain sight like this. And yet…

River had told them that she had grown up in Scotland in the Highlands near the ocean. Oban ticked all of the boxes. She had told Ava Ramirez, the little girl they’d rescued from a terrorists’ hideout last summer, stories about living in an old, falling-down castle by the sea. There was one in Oban, just outside of town. Hell, she had taken Clint up to see it one day.

Coulson had logged a lot of hours looking into River Song’s background, at least in the early days. He hadn’t had any choice; there were too many gaps in her background where danger could hide. Her past history had never gotten much clearer, but Coulson’s intensity in investigating it had faded over time. At a certain point, he’d just had to accept that he’d found out everything he was likely to find out about River. Every now and then, though, something came up that would send him searching again. 

He had a feeling that Oban was going to be one of those things.

 

_January 2009_  
 _Oban, Scotland_

The week before they were due to go back to England, Coulson paid a visit to the local library.

Clint and River had taken the ferry over to the Isle of Mull to spend the day. They had tried to talk Coulson into going with them, but he had shooed them off. Clint and River had been working very hard not to make him feel like a third wheel on this impromptu vacation, but Coulson didn’t mind acknowledging that he kind of was. Besides, he wanted them to have some time alone to act like a normal couple before they all had to get back to real life.

He wandered down to the archives on the lower level of the library mostly on a whim. The question of Oban was still bugging him slightly, and a little bit of recreational research never hurt anything. Coulson really didn’t expect to find anything on River Song, and he didn’t.

Instead, he found Robert and Elizabeth MacDonald.

 _The people who raised me,_ River had told him in a safe house in Italy. _Foster parents, I suppose you could call them. Robert and Elizabeth MacDonald. And before you waste the next three weeks researching them, you won’t find anything._

She had been both right and wrong about that. _Robert and Elizabeth MacDonald_ were common enough names that his previous searches had turned up too much information. Without additional parameters, there had been no way to narrow the field down to anything useful. For lack of any better ideas, Coulson enlisted the aid of a helpful library clerk and ran a search on those names in connection to Oban.

There they were, featured in a front page story in an old edition of the local newspaper. 

And that was where things started to get weird.

The first news story that had caught his eye concerned the disappearance and presumed death of the MacDonalds’ beloved niece and ward. According to the report, the girl had gone sailing with her aunt and uncle to one of the islands off the coast. On the way back to the mainland, she had gone over the side of the boat and been lost. Search parties had been organized, but after nearly a week, no trace of her had been found. 

There was a picture of the family on the second page: a tall, husky man with a crooked nose, a wholesome-looking woman with blonde hair, and a pretty girl with long pigtails. Melody Pond, age twelve.

Melody Pond. River Song. No way in hell was that a coincidence.

By the time Coulson surfaced from the papers, he had a pretty clear picture of the chain of events. Melody Pond’s body was never found despite extensive searches. The effort was eventually called off. A week after the girl’s obituary was printed, there was a small note near the back of the paper that said that Robert and Elizabeth MacDonald were moving away and planned to settle in England. The residence that they had vacated was the crumbling old castle outside of Oban. 

The newspapers were dated October of 1944.

River must have heard this story at some point in her life, Coulson reasoned. If she really had grown up somewhere near Oban, she could have heard the story and adopted details for her own background, putting her own twist on them. Why? Who the hell knew. But it was the only thing he could think of that made sense.

It didn’t make perfect sense, though. Coulson couldn’t quite shake the feeling that he was missing something big and obvious.

He got copies of all the relevant articles. “Genealogical research,” he explained to the librarian stationed at the help desk.

“Melody Pond? The girl who drowned?” The woman looked at him curiously. “You’re connected to the family?”

“You know the story?” Coulson asked, neatly sidestepping the question.

“Oh, yes, indeed.” The librarian’s account of the story was largely in line with the news stories Coulson had already read, but as she handed him his stack of photocopies she added, “You know, if you’re really interested in Melody Pond, the person you should talk to is my gran.”

Coulson briefly sized the woman up, running a quick mental estimate of how old “gran” was likely to be. “Was she living here at the time? Did she know the family?”

“Very well,” the librarian said with a nod. “Melody Pond was her best friend.”

*****

“Of course. I knew Melody very well.” Kathy Ferguson handed Coulson a flowered mug full of steaming tea and set a plate of biscuits on the kitchen table. “We were playmates from the time we were little. We went through grammar school together. It was such a sad thing, what happened to her.”

“It must have been hard, losing your friend like that,” Coulson said.

Mrs. Ferguson sighed as she sat down across the table from him, her own mug of tea cupped in her papery hands. She was a stout woman with thick white hair, the quintessential grandmother. Coulson tried to imagine what she must have looked like sixty years ago and found himself coming up empty.

“It was,” she said. “It’s funny, even at that time with the war on and all the horrible things we heard about every day, it seemed impossible that she could have died. And especially that she had drowned. I didn’t believe it for quite some time.”

“Why is that?” Coulson asked, helping himself to a biscuit.

“Oh, Melody was a strong swimmer. She was as at home in the ocean as she was in her own bathtub. And she was one of those children who was just full of life.” Mrs. Ferguson smiled a bit. “People always say that when a young person dies, but she truly was.”

“I’m sure it didn’t help,” Coulson said, “that they never recovered her body.”

Mrs. Ferguson nodded, sipping her tea. “And not for lack of trying, let me tell you,” she said. “The whole town turned out to search. The soldiers, too. You wouldn’t know it to look at Oban now, but during the war there was a huge military presence here: British, American, Canadian. Practically every man who could be spared from his duties volunteered to help, but they never did find anything.”

“I think I remember reading that her aunt and uncle, the MacDonalds, left town soon after that?”

“Right after the memorial service,” Mrs. Ferguson said. “It all seemed to happen so quickly. The other relations didn’t even attend.”

“The other relations?” Coulson asked.

“They had family in. . . Inverness, maybe? I don’t properly remember. They’d come out for a visit twice a year or so. Not always the same ones. There was a Mrs. Kovarian who always came, and a Dr. Weatherby. There were others, but they didn’t come every time, and I don’t remember their names. Odd folks. I remember that Melody didn’t like them terribly much. She had to sit through some sort of medical exam every time they visited. I have no idea why. Melody was as healthy a child as you’d ever meet. But I remember once she told me that the only thing in the world she was scared of was the doctor. And Melody was a girl who wasn’t scared of anything.”

Coulson filed that information away, not that he had any idea what he might use it for.

He passed a pleasant hour or so, talking with Mrs. Ferguson. She even helpfully brought out a box of old snapshots for him to look through. “My older brother was a bit of a photography nut,” she laughed, as Coulson looked at a picture of two girls standing in the road with their bicycles. Kathy and Melody, the summer before Melody had died. “He used to say he wished he could afford color film so that he could prove to everyone how _red_ her hair was. Poor boy. He was a bit sweet on her.”

Coulson slipped the picture into his pocket when Mrs. Ferguson took the mugs to the sink. He helpfully stacked the rest back into their box.

He hid the picture in his suitcase along with the photocopied news stories. Coulson didn’t know what the significance could possibly be of a girl who had died over six decades ago, but at least it was a new angle on an old puzzle.

 

_February 2009_  
 _New York_

Coulson was careful to keep his little off-books research project to himself. It would have been a hell of a lot easier if he could ask Agent Moretti to assist him, but he didn’t want to bring this to anyone’s attention yet.

Not until he figured out what the hell it all meant.

Coulson sat back, looking at the papers and pictures that were scattered across his dining room table. This file, which stayed locked up in the safe in his apartment, had grown considerably since his first trip to the Oban library.

He had gone there looking to see if he could find a clue to the puzzle that had occupied him, off and on, for the last three and a half years: Who was River Song?

Instead he had come away with a new question. Who was Melody Pond?

Who was she and what exactly was her connection to his agent? Because there _was_ a connection there. He just couldn’t see it yet.

Much like River Song herself, the matter of Melody Pond grew murkier and murkier the more he stirred the waters.

He’d had some time on his hands once they’d gotten back to New York. More to appease his curiosity than anything, Coulson had gone hunting for Robert and Elizabeth MacDonald to see if he could find out what had become of them once they’d left Oban. They couldn’t possibly be the people who had raised River, of course. Still, if she’d made her foster parents up based on some old story she’d heard, maybe learning more about them would eventually point to some real information about River. Hell, maybe they were relatives of some kind. Maybe if he traced things far enough, he could find an actual birth certificate.

Finding records from that era on the internet could be hit-or-miss, but one of the perks of a high-level SHIELD security clearance was having access to more information than the average web surfer. And now that he had a few more search parameters to go on, he found the MacDonalds easily. As the note in the Oban newspaper had said, they had moved south to England.

That’s where things got _really_ weird.

Robert and Elizabeth MacDonald had settled in Oxford with their niece. Melody Pond.

Coulson had stayed up all night piecing that one together. The school records he was able to dig up pointed to this Melody Pond being eight years old when the MacDonalds moved to Oxford. She had gone through school there, and had enrolled in Somerville College at the University of Oxford at the earliest age possible. She had read both Classics and mathematics, and had distinguished herself as a student. She was also, by some accounts he found, a talented piano player.

Coulson picked up a copy of a color portrait that had been taken of Melody Pond in 1955. She was wearing the Oxford uniform of a white blouse, black skirt, and black robe. She had been very beautiful with dark hair and big blue eyes. Records indicated that after graduating from university, she’d done some sort of work for the government. Coulson couldn’t quite pin down what, which was odd. What little information he found seemed to point to a secretarial position of some kind, but sources were vague as to which department she actually worked for.

It almost felt to Coulson like the sort of public record an intelligence agency would generate as a cover, but his view on situations like that was admittedly colored by his own job.

Information on Melody Pond II’s personal life was sparse as well. She’d never married or had any children. She’d died in 1966 at the age of thirty in an automobile accident in Paris.

Coulson picked another photo out of the contents of the file, holding it up to compare to the portrait. This one had been taken in Manchester in 1968 and showed an adolescent girl with long blonde hair. Melody Pond. Again. She was standing with an elderly man and woman. Though they were considerably older now, Coulson easily recognized them as the couple from the picture in the Oban newspaper.

Three Melody Ponds. All of them apparently orphans. All of them had guardians listed as Robert and Elizabeth MacDonald; the _same_ Robert and Elizabeth MacDonald. As far as Coulson could tell, there was never more than one Melody Pond at a time. None of the records he found overlapped. 

But though records were getting more plentiful and reliable by this time, Melody Pond III seem to completely vanish in 1974. Coulson couldn’t find any trace of her, but he had found that Robert and Elizabeth MacDonald had died in 1980 within months of each other.

Coulson dropped the pictures on the pile of research on his table, sitting back in his chair and rubbing his hands over his face.

“What the _fuck_?” he said, not for the first time since he’d started this hunt.

What was he looking at here? A crazy Scottish couple who kept adopting young girls and naming them after their dead niece, moving around Britain to keep up the charade? Or was something more sinister going on? Could this be a program of some kind? Multiple girls who were all raised with the same back story, possibly to confuse anyone who stumbled across it?

If that was the aim, Coulson had to hand it to them. It was working. If he had hair to spare, he’d be pulling it out right now.

And how did River fit into this? Had she really just heard an old story and adopted it as her own? Or had the story been given to her?

It was four-thirty in the morning, which meant that the big picture wasn’t going to get any clearer right now. Coulson gathered up his research, locked it up in the safe hidden in the back of his linen closet, and went to get a couple hours of sleep.

However River fit into this, it had kept for years. It would keep a while longer.

 

_March 2009_  
 _New York_

He found a fourth Melody Pond completely by accident.

Coulson had stayed late in his office to square away some old files. Ah, the glamorous life of a SHIELD agent: fighting the never ending battle against paperwork.

All the same, it was satisfying to put these particular files to bed. They were the last open files pertaining to the Harper Creek case, eight months earlier. From what Coulson had heard from Fury, Ava Ramirez had been doing very well since her rescue, barring the occasional bad day, and SHIELD had cleaned house on the terrorist cell.

These last few files were just sideline stuff, but Coulson gave each one a quick read-through before setting it in a box to go back down to the archives. He was skimming the file on Martin Clancy, the man who had been hired to kidnap Ava, when he spotted it.

There, under “Known Associates” was that damn name again.

_Pond, Mel (Melanie? Melinda? Melody? Melissa?)._

Coulson turned to his computer so fast that he smacked his knee against the corner of his desk.

“Son of a bitch!” Coulson rubbed his aching kneecap with one hand while typing in his password with the other.

There wasn’t a lot of information in the SHIELD database on _Pond, Mel_ , but what they had was solid blood and violence. She popped up here and there throughout the eighties and nineties. It looked like Martin Clancy and Mel Pond had teamed up on a kidnapping and murder in Brazil in the late 1998.

There was one grainy picture in the database of a woman in her mid-twenties. Mel Pond had chin-length dark hair, icy eyes, and a face that was sharp and striking. 

The last known sighting of Mel Pond had been in June of 2000 right over in Queens. The reports were very disjointed, but by all accounts some epic shit had gone down in that particular borough. Coulson vaguely remembered hearing about it, though he’d been out of the country on an assignment at the time, breaking in his new agent (he’d seriously had his hands full during Clint’s first year). For an incident that had practically taken place in SHIELD’s back yard, there wasn’t a whole lot of information beyond the concrete fact that a building had been gutted by an explosion of some kind. 

There were also some witness statements on file. Some seemed to indicate that a woman matching Mel Pond’s description had been killed. Others were less clear. Whatever had happened, Mel Pond had disappeared from the record.

Three months later, River Song had made her first known appearance in the record, enrolling as a student at Kirkwood School in Perth, Scotland. Coulson had spent more than three years searching for a trace of her from before that time without any success.

Melody Pond had to be the key. She _had_ to be. 

Though Coulson would be damned if he could tell how, yet.

*****

“At the risk of stating the stupidly obvious,” Valerie said, “you could just _ask_ her about it, couldn’t you?”

Coulson propped his feet up on his coffee table, relaxing back into the cushions of his sofa. It was a little irregular, he knew, bouncing problems like this off of a civilian, but that didn’t stop him from doing it. Valerie was discreet, she was safely removed from SHIELD and she didn’t mind listening to carefully censored versions of the problems he was puzzling over. After all, they might be friends with benefits, but they were old and good friends first and foremost. The benefits (as nice as they were) were secondary. 

He could hear Valerie moving around her kitchen on the other end of the phone line.

“The option is definitely on the table,” he said. “What are you making?”

“I’m trying out a new risotto recipe. Chicken and pine nuts.” There was a particularly loud sizzle in the background. “If it’s any good I’ll make it the next time you’re in town. So, why don’t you ask?”

It was a fair and logical question. Valerie had always been a good sounding board, even in situations like this one when Coulson could only give her half-information.

“I’m not sure I want to tip my hand just yet.”

“Why? What’s the worst that happens if you do?”

“If it _does_ mean something and she knows I’m digging into it? She clams up, shuts down, and I don’t get anywhere on this lead. Assuming it is a lead.”

“In other words,” Valerie said, “you’re in no worse shape than you are now. Besides, if she does do that, you’ll know you’re onto something.”

Coulson nodded, even though Valerie couldn’t see him. She was right, of course. He’d thought the same thing himself. A few years ago, he would have set all of this in front of River by now and let the chips fall where they may for the sake of getting answers. 

Times had changed. River was still his agent, but she was also his friend. Or maybe it was more accurate to say that she was like a sometimes-annoying kid sister or even a pseudo-daughter. No matter which way he looked at it, emotion had become a factor. Coulson still wanted answers, but not at the expense of making her feel threatened.

A tiny part of him wished he could just forget that he had stumbled across Melody Pond at all. But that was too dangerous a road to start to go down. 

He’d give it a few more weeks, Coulson promised himself. Then, if nothing had changed, he’d sit River down for a talk.

 

_April 2009_  
 _New York_

She was in such a good mood this morning that Coulson almost felt guilty, knowing that he was probably about to wreck it. There was nothing to be gained by putting it off, though, and this was an opportune a time as any.

River was sitting on the other side of his desk, watching him expectantly, no doubt wondering why he had asked her to swing by his office. Coulson casually flipped open a file, keeping one eye on her the whole time.

“Does the name ‘Melody Pond’ mean anything to you?”

***To be continued in _When the Doctor Comes to Call_ ***


End file.
